


Shift

by carriecmoney



Series: The Dryad Set [4]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Fantasy, Body Horror, M/M, Multi, Necromancy, Were-Creatures
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-23
Updated: 2015-12-23
Packaged: 2018-05-08 14:08:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5500142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carriecmoney/pseuds/carriecmoney
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>Shouyou Hinata, born 3259 and deceased 3272, stares hard at the 3289 calendar pinned to the wall by his perch. </em>I hope I have a summer birthday,<em> he thinks, preening under his wing, jeweled collar clanking. </em>Summer is way better than winter.<br/> </p><p>Modern fantasy AU where Gym Three runs a wildlife sanctuary/wereanimal orphanage and Shouyou is just trying to figure out how to live his life. Well, in a manner of speaking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shift

**Author's Note:**

> {A/N: This was gonna be a long oneshot, but this is gonna be full of emotional/coming-of-age Pain and I need reader motivation to keep me moving, so. Here you are :) Characters/tags will be added as they appear!  
> [tumblr](http://carriecmoney.tumblr.com) [twitter](http://www.twitter.com/carriecmoney)}

Shouyou Hinata, born 3259 and deceased 3272, stares hard at the 3289 calendar pinned to the wall by his perch. _I hope I have a summer birthday_ , he thinks, preening under his wing, jeweled collar clanking. _Summer is way better than winter._

The trapdoor to the dingy apartment shoves open in the far corner, flap banging against the wall. Shouyou perks up and glides the few meters over discarded newspapers and old blood to perch on the newly-arrived’s shoulder. He runs his beak through the silky black hair by his ear, pushing his jacket hood back with its force. His new perch sighs and scratches under his chin. “Evening, Hinata,” he yawns, finishing the climb up and kicking the door shut. “Sleep well?” Shouyou pecks him behind the ear, and he chuckles. “Sorry, I know.” He drops his bookbag and shrugs out of his outerwear, Shouyou hopping around his arms to avoid it. He tosses the vest and jacket on a reaching oak branch before flopping face-first on the ratty couch, groaning. Shouyou perches on one of the little red stumps growing from his scalp, head cocking back and forth. “Ge’off,” he groans into a throw pillow. Shouyou trills. “I’ean it.” Shouyou caws and flaps twice, flying to his human head height, then shifts forms, the familiar grind and pop as his body morphs from crow to human shape making the couch dweller jump up. “Shou!”

Shouyou props his fists on his hips, glaring down at him. “If you would learn more crow then I wouldn’t have to shift to have a decent conversation, _Tobio_.”

Tobio grunts and stands, taking Shouyou’s wrists to check his seams. “You have to be careful,” he says, deep red sparks lacing up an opening on his right forearm. “Stop causing your body so much stress, it’s-"

“Delicate, I _know_.” Shouyou clenches his dangling fists, mismatched skin straining. “But what good is a shifter who can’t shift?”

Tobio grunts again, sending more sparks up his body to fix any hidden cracks under his clothes. “You’re fine without it,” he growls, dropping his wrists and falling back on the couch, rubbing a hand over his eyes. “Stop scaring me like that.”

“Or what?” Shouyou flings his arms wide, a bitter smile twisting his face. “You’ll kill me?”

Tobio cracks an eye, brow furrowed. “What’s up with you today?”

Shouyou pouts and climbs on the couch next to him, crossing his legs and clutching his bare ankles, one foot a size larger than the other. His knees bounce as he frowns at the shitty apartment, twilight peeking around the frayed edges of the blackout curtains. Tobio waits, stretching his long legs out in front of them. Shouyou runs his tongue along his gums, dipping into the empty spots of missing teeth.

“I think today was my birthday,” he says after a while. Tobio jerks – he was _sleeping_ , the pricker – then makes a gross noise in the back of his throat. Shouyou narrows his eyes at him. “What?”

“You’ve said that every other day for months,” Tobio moans, rubbing at his face. “Besides, it’s in November, so shut up.”

“That’s my _re_ birthday, moron. I mean my _real_ one.”

Tobio’s eye twitches. “I know what you _mean_.” He crosses his arms with a huff. “Just drop it.”

Shouyou squawks. “ _No!_ I’m _fifteen_ , I should at least know when my _birthday_ is!”

“Then get mad at your stupid parents for not writing it on your headstone, not me!” Tobio sinks into the couch further, the stumps on his head twisting tighter. “And you’re _not_ fifteen. You’re two.”

“ _You’re_ two.”

“You _act_ like you’re two.” Shouyou sticks out his tongue so far that the tip falls off into the crack between their couch cushions. They stare at the slot, blank for a moment - oh _no. T_ hey both scramble for it, but Tobio finds it first and picks off dirty sofa lint, lip curling. Shouyou opens his mouth wide, nose wrinkled, as Tobio grips his chin steady, magic zinging through what’s left of his tongue. “You _will_ be the death of me,” Tobio mutters, breath misting over Shouyou’s clammy skin.

“An’ wha’ll you ‘o ‘en?”

Tobio flicks his cheek. “Stop squirming.” He reattaches Shouyou’s tongue and releases his jaw.

Shouyou works it like he’s trying to get a bad taste out – at least, that’s what he thinks it’s like. He hasn’t tasted anything beyond the tang of Tobio’s magic since before he died. “And what’ll you do then?” he repeats, poking Tobio’s shoulder. “You can’t very well bring _yourself_ back from the dead, _can_ you?”

“There’s a first time for everything.”

“You’re such a dumbass! If you would just let me _try_ something sometime-”

“ _No!_ ” Tobio grabs his hand, five fingers crammed together, and glares at him. “We have no idea what would happen if you did any magic. It’s too risky.”

Shouyou stares Tobio down. They've ran this argument in circles around Tobio’s tucked-away red oak tree for months now, Shouyou trying to spread his wings, Tobio too worried he’ll lose a feather that he can’t regrow if he takes off. Of course, he loses them all the time, but that’s beside the point. Shouyou wants to _do_ something besides stare at an abused calendar and ride on Tobio’s shoulder around creepy graveyards. He wants to shift without a limb threatening to fall off. He wants to _eat_ again, digest his food instead of it fermenting in his static stomach. He wants to fall asleep in strange places, wake up in the sun, _feel_ the sun, talk to someone besides Tobio and the neighborhood sparrows, who only scream at him from two trees over. He wants to celebrate his birthday in the summer.

Tobio sets his jaw and glares right back.

In the end, Shouyou looks away first. He huffs and pulls his knees to his chest, plopping his chin on them. “ _Fine_. Whatever. Do what you want.”

Tobio moans and flops sideways on the couch, squirming around until his legs are flung up on the cushion behind Shouyou, arm over his eyes. “I’m not awake enough for this,” he grumbles into his sleeve. He rolls to bury his face in the back cushion, a nearby bough straining to block the weak light on his face. “Wake m’up when the sun’s down,” he grunts, hiding in the joint of the cushion and the armrest, long limbs thrown everywhere.

Shouyou watches him fall asleep, how angle of his eyebrows eases and his stunted dryad crown grows a few inches when it's no longer being consciously repressed, reaching for any light. His snufflings soon turn to light snores, shoulders rising and falling with each breath.

Shouyou looks away and around the apartment. It’s crammed with books, oak boughs clutching textbooks, trashy kid’s lit, and grimoires from weird thrift stores all on the same rows. Faded chalk and charcoal circles drawn on scrap paper are held up with twigs,; amethyst chunks, dirty clothes, and drying sage dangle from the ones overhead. Was his old room this chaotic? Did he have a sibling to share it with? Did his family live in a human house or a crow’s nest?

Well. He's not going to find his answers cooped up here, that’s for sure. His death was pre-Lynx; no one had bothered to scan in the obituaries of a small town fifteen years ago. The only things he knew about his first life were what was written on his headstone – his name, his relative lifespan, and one tagline, _THE SON OF SUNS_. Maybe he had a parent who was a poet.

He glances at the sleeping Tobio, only the tip of an ear visible around the threadbare cushion, and sighs. He won’t figure anything about who he used to be tied to his silver belt. He gets to his feet, careful not to jostle the couch, and stretches as the last flash of sunlight slips away outside to leave the moon to his domain. No use in wasting time.

He fumbles behind his neck for the clasp on his collar. The two halves of the pewter chain pool in his palm, the uneven oval of amethyst set in the center plate winking up at him. He sets it on the arm of the couch by Tobio’s head, then shifts to crow and takes off through an opening between branches into the new night.

* * *

He starts his search at his only lead – his old grave. Tobio had covered up the evidence of his very illegal proceedings years ago, the grass grown over the scar like all the others. Tobio was right – the light of the three-quarters moon was best on this corner of the gated graveyard, illuminating the granite like witchfire. He’s been here before, drawn to his old resting spot whenever he’s in its sphere of influence, but it’s all he’s got. He finds a tree with a good view and full shade and waits.

It only takes an hour for Tobio to show up, running, shoes untied, leaves bright red. Shouyou chirps and huddles close to his tree trunk.

“ _Shouyou!_ ” Tobio yells, whipping around on Shouyou’s grave, eyes white in the moonlight. Metal flashes from his clenched fist. Shouyou trembles against the bark, but the tug he usually feels when Tobio needs him is gone – the magic one, anyway. He digs his talons in the bark and watches Tobio’s chest heave as he screams his name again, again, before he sits hard on Shouyou’s headstone, face in his hands. Shouyou sticks his head under his wing to drown it out.

Shouyou loses track of time, hiding and watching and waiting. Tobio doesn’t move from his headstone, toe of his untied shoe caught in the hollow where people are supposed to put flowers in. It’s never been filled, not as long as Shouyou remembers. No one cares about a dead teenager when he’s been buried longer than he was alive.

Shouyou hops through the tree branches away from the graveyard until he can take off out of Tobio’s sight.

* * *

It’s easier to be a crow in the wild than a human, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t still suck. He doesn’t have to eat or sleep, but his body is weak, only going so fast for so far before it gives out on him. Without Tobio to fix him up, he has to watch his wings, preserving his mismatched body parts in normal ways. Other birds and animals give him a wide berth. Even at a distance, they can tell something’s wrong with him. He flies at night and hides in the day, in the shadows of pine trees at the edge of fields, of ballparks, watching people work and play and eat and _live_ , and he’s lost as to how to approach them. He’s lost.

As the nights spin by, he loses track of himself, half-dead brain shutting down as he aimlessly glides over dark forests and scattered farmland. He’s not going anywhere anymore - this world is so much bigger than he thought possible, and so much of it looks the same. Each time he stops, he loses a piece of himself - a feather, a nail, a shard of his beak. He stays as a crow, simple animal emotions absorbing his complex human ones. For the first time in years, he feels dead.

He doesn’t know how long he wanders before he notices that the ground is rising and falling beneath him more often. Tobio had mentioned once that there were mountains to the south – he must have found the foothills. The trees are bigger here, the lavender patchwork farms giving way to evergreen thickets. He flies over a town peeking through deep green crowns, only a few streetlights on at this time of night. He thinks about stopping, but it’s not yet dawn, and why? What’s the difference between this town and a town just over the mountain? Still, he circles this puzzle piece of civilization, the park in the center square, the volunteer fire department, the town hall. The graveyard. He shakes himself hard enough that a feather flutters down, and he moves on.

Up the hill from the town is a strange twist in the trees. Shouyou caws, a thought called _curious_ poking around in his skull, and glides closer. It’s a weird building, multi-layered and mismatched, like each room had been added on a different person’s whim, constructed around two trees - a large elm and a gnarled, pale gray trunk, its few branches thick and barren. Shouyou caws again and circles it – it’s _new_. He likes new things, and thinks he always has. He perches on a middle bough. It’s stone under him, ungiving, bark fused to the wood beneath it. He inspects it with his beak and tongue, tasting cold rock instead of splinters and resin. Weird. He walks down the bough to the abrupt end of it, bending over to look at the rings. Even in the night, it sparkles. He pecks at it – his beak gets chipped instead of the tree. He squawks and fumbles back, crossing his eyes to try and see the damage. Great. An owl hoots from the trees behind him – an _owl?_

He hops, spinning to face the owl hoot – owls are big and _scary_ , the only kind of bird that got close enough for him to see that on his night travels. His talons slip on the stone tree, and he stumbles, flipping off sideways, world spinning as he tries to get air under him. Before he can, two huge paws slam around him, pinning his wings to his sides so all he can do is wriggle and claw. He screams out-

_And what do we have here?_

Shouyou freezes, panic making him crazy, and stares up at his captor. A huge black cat-face looks down at him, yellow eyes glowing; perched on the cat’s head is the owl, white and black striped feathers sticking up around its face. The owl tilts its – his – head, considering Shouyou. _You’re a weird one, huh?_ he asks Shouyou in a low hoot. Is he another shifter? Shouyou hasn’t met one since he died, but there’s a tickle at the back of his birdbrain that this one smells like a shifter. Shouyou can only blink up at them, mouth open.

“Kuroo, let him go,” a human voice says, leaves crunching under their feet as they approach. The cat’s eyes narrow, but the paws release him, his wings sprawling out on the ground with their new freedom, legs still sticking up in the air. When had he lost another toe?

The face for the voice appears, pale face under a thin curtain of hair, twigs sticking out from their head that match the tree behind them. They have the same kind of yellow eyes as the cat, but they’re not scary as they bend down to pick Shouyou up with soft hands. They help him stabilize on their forearm with bird dignity before sitting down cross-legged where they are, running light fingers over Shouyou’s feathers. Shouyou stares at their face in silence, shoulders raised as the cat and owl creep in close to watch. They find Shouyou’s missing feathers, toes, and his disjointed ankle, lips pressing together tight.

There’s a flutter and a gust behind their back. Where the owl was now stands a human, hair still in those black and white spikes. He sprawls on the cat’s back lengthwise, chin propped on his huge forehead. “I was right, he’s a weird one, yeah?”

“Yeth.” They run two fingers down Shouyou’s spine, and he shivers, cawing low enough that it’s almost a purr. They barely smile. “Would you like to come inthide?” they ask with a slight lisp, like he’s got something on his teeth. “Ish warm, and we can feed you, if you need it.”

Shouyou’s stomach plummets – wait. He flexes his talons on their bare forearm. There’s no heartbeat under there. Just like him. He peers up at their face and sees the beginnings of an understanding. He bird-shrugs a ‘yes’. The owl shifter caws, strange from human vocal folds, and rolls off of the cat, jumping up into owl form and circling down to the ground two stories below. The cat leaps down the tiered rooftops after him, but Shouyou’s perch rests a hand on his back to keep him there as he gets back to his feet and walks across the leaf-littered balcony to the open door in the wall, petting Shouyou the whole time.

Inside is a sleeping madhouse, toys of all ages scattered along the winding halls, closed doors painted bright colors with names stamped on them with stencils. They take Shouyou past all of them, down, further down, before the hall opens up to a golden-brown kitchen, expansive but still jam-packed with _stuff_.

The cat and the owl had beat them down, the cat’s huge paws dangling from his lounge on an overhead elm bough, the owl back to human form and chomping on a sandwich. Shouyou clambers up their arm to sit on their shoulder, burrowing into the soft fall of hair by their cheek. The owl grins, lettuce in his teeth. “I think they like you, Kenma,” he says, tomato spitting across the counter. Kenma reaches up to scratch Shouyou’s chin. He lifts his half-cracked beak to bare it more. Kenma hums. The owl looks at Shouyou, round eyes unblinking. “How about a shift, kid? I mean, you don’t hafta if you don’ wanna, but it’s _so_ annoying to translate for the ground-walkers all the time.” Shouyou shuffles his feet. He hasn’t shifted since he left Tobio, and even though he’s been pretty good about keeping himself together, all things considered, he really doesn’t want to find out how much he’ll fall apart when shifting in a room of strangers. _Scary_ strangers.

The owl heaves a sigh when he doesn’t make a move. Kenma keeps scratching his chin. “Maybe it will eathe their consthienche if you introdushe yourself firsh.”

The owl snaps his fingers. “An excellent idea!” He flings his arms wide, a bit of lettuce flying, and kicks up his heels. “I’m Koutarou, and welcome to the Third Haven, the leading refuge for humans, animals, and anyone caught in between!” The shoulder under Shouyou sags with Kenma’s sigh. Koutarou points the sandwich at the cat. “That’s Kuroo, or Tetsurou when he’s not a panther, and the shoulder you’re sitting on is the dryad for that tree you were picking at just now.”

Dryad? Shouyou looks up – unlike Tobio’s stubby, barely-there dryad crown, Kenma has thick, stiff branches, just like the weird stone tree outside. Shouyou hops up to a branch - it doesn’t shift under him like Tobio’s used to. He cocks his head and caws at it. Koutarou laughs, head thrown back. Shouyou runs his beak over the branch above him - it tastes like the tree out there, stone and cold. Kenma covers a giggle with a hand.

“Get down, that ticklesh.” Shouyou ruffles his wings, but obeys, hopping back down to their shoulder and following the outstretch of Kenma’s arm to their lifted wrist. “We’re not going to hurt you,” they say. “You’re safe now.”

“What’s your name, kid?” Koutarou asks from behind him. He twists to look over his shoulder, where Koutarou is licking tomato juice off his fingers with a grin that hasn’t left his face the entire time he’s been human.

 _Shouyou_ , he says. Koutarou’s grin spreads.

“Shouyou, huh?” He winks at Kenma. “Maybe you should watch yourself around him, Kenma.”

Kenma shakes their head. “I don’t tink so.” They bend in to peer closer at Shouyou’s face. “I haven’t met a fellow vampire in a while,” they murmur, pointed teeth flashing with each word. Shouyou squawks and hops off their wrist, feet slamming on the ground a shift later.

“I am _not_ a vampire!” he snaps, hands on his – oh, drat. He grimaces and holds his arms out – his seams are cracked, two fingers are open stubs, and his remaining fingernails have turned black. “Witchfire.”

Koutarou crows and leaps from the counter as Kenma blinks, lips parted. Koutarou doesn’t touch him, but he inspects Shouyou's human form with medical precision, from spotted scalp to mismatched toes. Shouyou freezes – if his heart worked, it would be hammering. He looks up at Shouyou from his crouch at his feet. “What happened to _you_?”

Shouyou swallows on nothing. “I- I’m not sure if I should say.”

Koutarou pouts for a moment, then shrugs and hops to his feet - he’s so big and _tall_. Shouyou leans away. “Well, I’m sure it’s a good story, whenever you wanna tell it.” He looks at Kenma, who has recovered from their shock, face neutral once more. “Should we wake up Hitoka?”

Kenma frowns and takes Shouyou’s wrist with a gentle hand. “I’m not sure if she could do much here.” They run the very tip of their fingers along the edge of Shouyou’s seam. “What _are_ you?” they whisper.

Shouyou bites his lip and looks away. “I don’t know anymore.” The hard shell he's carried since leaving Tobio crumbles, his human complexity flooding back now that his brain can handle it, and he pitches forward into Kenma’s chest, clutching their sweater. His tear ducts don’t work either, so all he can do is dry-sob as it crashes over him, relentless tidal waves of mixed-up emotion. He  _wails_. 

Kenma doesn’t move under him, not even to breathe. A large hand rests between his shoulderblades, warm and steady. A heavy weight leans against his side, almost knocking him over; he cracks an eye – the panther has joined them, gold eyes unblinking, barely a foot below Shouyou’s. He closes his own as Kenma’s smaller hands come up to take hold of his elbows, cheek brushing his temple.

It’s nice not to be alone anymore.


End file.
